A mind for fact, a whim for fiction

May 5 2003

John Maxwell, Foyster Educator, 1941-2003

An enthusiasm for science fiction, like that for cross-dressing or raising toads, is something most high-placed professionals prefer to hide from their colleagues. Such was John Foyster's extraordinary nature, however, that, while occupying distinguished positions in Australian higher education, he contrived also to flourish as a critic, amateur publisher and fan of sci-fi.

Sci-fi fans range from the torpid to the unhinged, but Foyster was that rarest of them, a scholar who wore his learning lightly and an enthusiast who never bored. Neither his love for education nor for the sci-fi he mockingly called "skiffy" ever obscured an often devastating eye for their weaknesses. He resigned from the Australian Council for Educational Research in 1976 over its withholding the statistics for Aboriginal students from a report, and was no less severe in addressing the fecklessness of many sci-fi fans.

He disapproved of shabby writing and said so. This skill was internationally applauded, and in 1979 fans from many countries financed his trip to England for the World SF Convention in Brighton.");document.write("

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As an educator, he rose to a position in the senior secondary assessment board of South Australia, then left in 1991 to become manager of the statistics division for the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. Many colleagues followed him there, an indication of his charm and expertise.

In 1998 he retired, relaunching himself as a consultant under the somewhat disconcerting title Foyster Fact and Fiction. In this capacity he made many trips to Malaysia as team leader of research projects concerning the expansion of its polytechnic system. He also cultivated an enthusiasm for the local cuisine.

Over the decades his character deepened, widened, even mellowed. Beards and marriages came and went, but a taste for fluorescent shoelaces and crimson shirts and ties, with the occasional boiler suit of the same colour, survived. But at heart Foyster remained serious, dryly humorous and somewhat pedantic.

He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Australian fandom and

knew the science fiction read by our predecessors. He could discourse on the superiority of Henry Kuttner's style over that of, say, Raymond Z. Gallun or Otis Adelbert Kline.

In the 1960s some authors saw technology as something to be kicked about in pursuit of a good plot. Foyster, who had abandoned a budding teaching career to take a bachelor of science degree at Monash University, graduating with first-class honours, really understood the second law of thermodynamics - and, we suspected, the first and third as well.

Once, after an evening of heated conversation,

the subject of cinema came up and I cited the French magazine Cahiers du Cinema. "What magazine?" Foyster inquired. I told him. Reprovingly, he corrected my pronunciation: not "ka-heers" but "ki-ay". So he knew French too. It just wasn't fair.

Foyster's achievements were all the more remarkable for his adversities. He never fully recovered from childhood polio, although he credited the long hospital spell with his love of reading. Three sons by his second marriage were born prematurely. Two survived only hours, while the third, James, lived 16 months, only to die in 1985 from a progressive deterioration of the brain, which Foyster chronicled in a fanzine account many found too painful to read.

Asked to nominate the one book he would snatch from his shelves if his house was burning down, he did so with the wry comment that he could speak from experience, since his house had burned down, with his books in it. Typically, however, he claimed most to regret losing an empty Vat 69 scotch bottle. He had watched the jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of his great enthusiasms, drain the contents unaided in Melbourne late in 1965, and had treasured it since.

The book Foyster nominated, How To Read English Poetry by R.H. Blyth (and which, again characteristically, was published in Tokyo and aimed at Japanese readers), contained the comment, "I have an idea that the entrance examination to Heaven is a reading aloud of poetry." In his last weeks, Foyster was re-reading In Search of Lost Time, the new translation of Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, and filling fanzines and correspondence with comparisons with the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translation. It was typical of Foyster, an educator and a fan to the end.

He was married three times, to Claire Elizabeth Naomi Pike (1966, marriage dissolved), Jennifer Louise Bryce (1980, marriage dissolved), and, last year, to his longtime companion, the writer and critic Yvonne Margaret Rousseau, who survives him, as does a daughter by his first marriage, Jillian Miranda.